17Jan05
Albert Simonin’s novel Touchez pas au grisbi is said to have had a revolutionary impact on French crime writing, and Jacques Becker’s film version had a similarly transformative effect on French crime films, yet film and novel bear little resemblance to each other. In fact Becker, with the help of Simonin, pretty much threw the book out the window. Told in the first person by the aging career criminal Max le Menteur (played in the film by Jean Gabin), Simonin’s novel is an exuberant exercise in argot for its own sake and even comes with a glossary to help the reader wade through its impasto of criminal discourse. Crowded with incident, casually violent, narrated with a sort of comic grandiosity, it works its effects entirely through the power of an unleashed dialect, and the effect is something like a Gallic marriage of Damon Runyon and Mickey Spillane.
Becker keeps the novel’s milieu and a good number of its characters—and changes just about everything else. The wise-guy, almost vaudevillian tone of the book gives way in the film to a clipped melancholy, unblinking and loaded with gravity. Exaggerated speech becomes a series of laconic exchanges, with the previously garrulous Max—Simonin’s endlessly talkative narrator—the tersest of all; carefree promiscuity gives way to a mood of aging desire; and violence is kept to a minimum, even though the threat of violence is everywhere. As for humor, it is everywhere and nowhere, a hard-bitten humor that seasons every conversation without ever suggesting anything like relaxed enjoyment. Plot, finally, which abounds in Simonin’s novel, here becomes—at least until the final violent explosion—a chain of suggestive pauses. Becker’s genius in Touchez pas au grisbi is to focus resolutely on what comes before or after or falls in between the decisive actions: it’s a film where we learn how gangsters brush their teeth.
17Jan05
Jacques Becker may well be the most seriously underestimated director in the history of French cinema. Even in his own lifetime, he suffered disparaging comments. Wrote Jacques Demeure about Touchez pas au grisbi in a 1957 Positif article: “Here we can measure the abyss that separates Becker from his master Renoir…. From Renoir, Becker has only derived certain narrative devices, such as a way of using doors…. Décor soon becomes the essential factor, and the film becomes simply decorative.” True, things have improved since then. In 1998, a critics’ poll in the very same journal chose Grisbi as the finest French crime movie ever made. But despite the tributes of such figures as François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Renoir himself at the time of Becker’s death in 1960, it was more than thirty years before anyone thought to mount a complete retrospective—and even then it wasn’t in France, but at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.
If Becker has received less than his due as a filmmaker, it may be partly because, like Franju, Melville, Clouzot, and Grémillon, he belongs to that intermediate, less celebrated generation of French directors who flourished in the years between the Golden Age of the 1930s and the rise of the Nouvelle Vague in the late 1950s. But it may also be because Becker is one of the great underactors among directors, with no interest in flashy technical devices or show-off camera moves: his dexterity, the unstressed elegance of his images, the wit and fluency of his narrative style have led some critics to write him off as a lightweight, lacking in seriousness. Also, Becker loved to explore fresh territory and different genres—no way to build a reputation as a respected auteur.
17Jan05
Along with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, Casque d’or is now widely recognized as the summit of Jacques Becker’s achievement as a filmmaker, a distillation of everything that’s most personal and central to his vision. All the more surprising, then, to realize that the material came to him fourth-hand, having been successively turned down by Julien Duvivier, Yves Allégret, and Henri-Georges Clouzot—and that when Casque d’or was first released many French critics were unimpressed, finding it a letdown after his previous films. What most disappointed them, it seems, was that Becker—hitherto seen as the chronicler of contemporary French society—had made a period film.
Yet Becker was determined that Casque d’or should not be, in any conventional sense, a period film. “I wanted my actors to behave as though they were living at the time,” he explained, “not as if they were wearing costumes.” And in that he fully succeeded: His recreation of turn-of-the-century Paris is lovingly detailed and exact, and within it his cast move, speak, and hold themselves as in their native habitat.
10Jan05
“Just shut up and watch!”
So snarls a frenzied gangster-pimp to baby-faced tough Joe Shishido as the creep whips a prostrate prostitute. There’s plenty for the naked eye to absorb: the delicate calligraphic detail of the bloody lash marks, set off by her tasteful black cocktail dress and the even redder carpet where she’s sprawled like a Jackie O rag doll. The psycho’s horn-rimmed glasses are a nice conservative touch—he fumes like an accountant gone mad. Outside the mansion’s sliding-glass doors, a freakish Forbidden Planet sandstorm is raging, an ill wind blowing straight from the id. If this were a Goya etching, it could be titled The Sleep of Reason Breeds Mobsters. Now the hysterical woman tries to flee into the orange-yellow desert, but Whip Boy leaps the railing and catches her, resuming his attack as the camera captures the whole sequence in one virtually static shot from inside the yawning house. (In its sang-Freud stoicism, this eloquently framed doorway-to-hell view suggests Ozu if an action imp spiked his green tea with acid.) The assailant falls on her, then a jagged cut to him as he fervently kisses his half-nude victim, her limp fingers tracing unconscious lines in the dunes.
With Youth of the Beast from 1963, after eight years and an astonishing thirty features gestating in the nether reaches of the Japanese B-movie circuit, Seijun Suzuki’s axiomatic world comes into sudden focus. It’s a visceral universe of brutal non sequiturs and coolly theatrical artifice (giving genre materials a casual he–Man Ray makeover), one whose limpid irrationality seems to look back toward silent cinema even as it basks in wild crypto-pop stylization. Beast (which is not so big on youth but tilts toward thugs and slatterns who look as if they were born middle-aged) features Suzuki’s patented danse macabre of rough-trade sadists and murderous masochists, with Shishido as the scowling centrifuge around which all these random archetypal particles revolve. This was the second film Suzuki made with his favorite lead torpedo, following on the heels of Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards. Two qualities stand out: the sense of a director hitting his stride, full of devil-may-care assurance and try-anything imagination, coupled with an uneasy, palpable boredom with the stale trappings (in the most literal sense of the term) of the cops’n’yakuza form. Youth of the Beast rapidly escalates into an exercise in making diametrically opposed impulses complementary—Suzuki discovers a special comic-melodramatic gift for turning ennui into excitement, simultaneously outflanking the two-fisted rawness of Sam Fuller and the blank-teller alienation of Michelangelo Antonioni.
10Jan05
In an essay published in 1981 in the Japanese film magazine Art Theater, Suzuki Seijun’s kid brother Kenji offered what still stands as one of the most illuminating comments on his brother’s cinema: “Seijun and I are completely different characters, but we do share one trait, and that’s to do with our sense of aesthetic values. […] Both he and I stopped absorbing influences from outside in our early twenties, and so both his films and my essays are still strongly marked by what we felt in our adolescence. We have now reached middle age, but the source of our thoughts is still the way we felt about things in our early twenties.”
Suzuki Seijun was forty-three years old when he made Fighting Elegy, his penultimate film for Nikkatsu, but it was—and remains—a wonderfully youthful movie. A subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist, it goes where no film before had gone in search of comic insights into the adolescent male mind. It’s set in the mid-1930s, at the precise moment when militarism consolidated its grip on the imagination of young Japanese men—a moment, therefore, that fuelled the country’s imperialist ambitions in East Asia and ultimately led to the Pacific War. To look back at that time from 1966 was to raise unresolved issues of nationalism and Japanese identity, issues still as relevant to many young people as to those of Suzuki’s generation who had been conscripted to fight.
